


all wrapped in bones of setting sun

by goldfinvhs



Category: Cosmere - Brandon Sanderson, Stormlight Archive - Brandon Sanderson
Genre: Fantasy Fulfillment, Isolation, M/M, Prison, Self-Sacrifice, and nurse my shallan/jasnah wounds, apparently princes who live their lives in public don't do well in captivity? shocking, purposefully not mentioning shallan until i figure out the dynamic of this ot3, sorta?, this was not supposed to be me getting in adolin's head i swear on ash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-29
Updated: 2019-07-29
Packaged: 2020-07-25 13:15:27
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,651
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20026432
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/goldfinvhs/pseuds/goldfinvhs
Summary: And Sadeas, well, Sadeas dodged, of storming course he did. The most dazing was how little it mattered, in that moment. Still in broken armor, which now began to dip into malfunction as steadily as a tired chull, the prince leaned on his knees and watched the man who saved his life being dragged away.





	all wrapped in bones of setting sun

**Author's Note:**

> Set in Words of Radiance, when Adolin decides to be imprisoned along (though sadly far away from) Kaladin after the Idiot Stormblessed saves him in the duel. Prompted by the wonderful @freoduweard. Small inconsistencies because I could not be arsed to check even though I've *just* read this bit. Also, their imprisonment is just under two weeks, instead of three, as I think Sanderson seriously overestimates people's capacity to spend time in darkness and solitude. People with trauma but also hopeless extroverts who've had nothing of this sort before.
> 
> I kind of want to continue this or at least expand on several ideas, like Adolin's understanding of what an absolute arsehole he's been towards the bridgemen and the ordeal they suffered, but alas, I am a fickle creature.

_We all have ways of keeping. May the earth_  
_have an easy way of letting go of me._  
— Emma Bolden, from “Keeping Things,” published in Bomb Cyclone

The first hours of prison were actually _relaxing_. After the spins Adolin's emotions had taken in the arena, zipping faster than windspren through self-punishment and self-adulation, in between focus and the sheer, curdling taste of panic, having nothing to feel was a salve. Well, not entirely true; he felt outrage. Revulsion. All the simmering bits of wrath and loathing which amassed in the past weeks, now coming together in an onslaught. He could _kill_ him, Plate be stormed. He could cross that field of sand and cowardice and pull out his innards with bare hands. It played in Adolin's head, right behind his eyes, like liquor, like music. And yet, the more he dwelt on this scene, it was not Sadeas' face that gaped at him, blood trickling over those bulbous lumps. It was Amaram's.

He believed every single word Kaladin had said. Not reasonably, no; he only justified them with carefully trimmed arguments hours later. He'd needed those for his father, and the guards, and every single man in Damnation who perked his eyebrows at him. But he had believed Kaladin against all reason, right there on the dueling grounds. He sided with him in a _surge _of faith, of visceral meaning, as though the first sound of the world clicking into place rung through him.

And then Elhokar's henchmen were on the bridgeman before Adolin could take one step. And Sadeas, well, Sadeas dodged, of storming course he did. The most dazing was how little it mattered, in that moment. Still in broken armor, which now began to dip into malfunction as steadily as a tired chull, the prince leaned on his knees and watched the man who saved his life being dragged away.

"How dare he? Highprince Amaram-- I would have _never_...-" The King's voice resounded through the upper tier about as clearly as a cremling's scratch. Layers and layers of lighteyes had already bowed their heads to one another and tittered with the steadiness of a natural force. The darkeyes were louder, though less uniform; indignation seemed to ripple through them in waves. Adolin saw them all as he would a sea of moving grass, his vision already beginning to cloud at the edges. Storms, he was _drained_. He felt he could crumple and doze off right where he stood, but then a thought slashed through him: two names, tumbling in his mind at once, indistinct. Renarin. Kaladin.

He darted (a flattering word for the limping, deadweight steps the Shards allowed him) towards his younger brother.

"Renarin? Renarin. Are you hurt?"

Behind him, he could feebly make out his father's shouting match with some other Highprince. He dared hope it was Elhokar. His brother, however, sketched no movement to indicate he'd heard. The dark hair's hand clenched at equal intervals around air. Empty air. _Air which had been humming, only moments ago_. 

Glad to be rid of his helmet and gauntlets, if not the armor's main bulk, Adolin rested a hand on his brother's shoulder.

"You stalled him off. Stormfather, what were you _thinking_?"

He had not expected a response; he had long stopped being frustrated at his brother's silences, the way he did when he was younger, impatient, and even more of a storming fool.

"You both saved my life, Renarin. Two men risked their own for my brashness - my utter, absolute idiocy. I should at least be short an arm and a Blade for it."

_You tired to surrender, and then you stood your ground_, a voice inside him noted, a voice he could not allow. He had to understand how close he'd come to risking everything that morning - storms, it was difficult, with the afterimage of winning still burned on his retina, but Adolin owed it to himself to try. He had a brutal feeling that if he let this slip through his fingers, become another _victory _\- even one that was not entirely his own - he would lose something important. Clarity. Mastery of his own actions. Perhaps the same thing men like Elhokar had lost.

"Unfortunately", he went on, unraveled by the bitter determination rising up as he spoke, "one of those men is in jail. And the other is my brother, whom I care about above all else, and who needs to stop trying to die protecting us." A tired smile hitched his lips upward. "Not that I'll begrudge you this time, though. You _did _save me, Renarin. Will you be alright here?" Servants had already gathered on the fringes of their odd triangle, the prince's hands rested on the kneeling form as if in a ritual, unsure whether they should step in. Finally, Renarin gave a faint nod.

Adolin gathered the last embers of power and strode back, all the way before the Highprinces.

"Father. Your Majesty. Call on your guards."

_***_

It went like this: exhaustion had sapped all his intensity, so while he laid on the improvised bed cot they had carried over into the cell, Adolin revised the events of the day, and the way the balance toppled in their favor. Inexplicably. But he was too tired to rehash the how and why. Like rage, he stored incredulity somewhere in the cellars of his own mind.

As night dragged itself over the world (the prince felt it coming in the guards being relieved from their posts, in the servants shuffling their feet more slowly, in the foreign chill the air had acquired) something of that numbness began to crack off. He was not yet alert, no, but he was fitful. His eyes closed every now and then, and he felt like he would only sleep minutes, the shadows on the wall unstirred, unchanged.

The Prince of House Kholin got up to find his slop pail. They'd given him a gilded one, Kelek's eyes; actual bronze, nothing Soulcast, and inscribed with various whorling patterns. As if anyone taking a piss in the dark needed the distraction. After he watered in his hands in a nearby vat, using a ladle, no less, he began to feel somewhat amused by this entire business. And pleased with himself, too. It was a neat trick he'd pulled, despite Dalinar's initial rebuttal. Kaladin was somewhere next to him, after all - Elhokar's orders could not be carried out, not on a whim, not without Adolin hearing the jailers come in. Hearing them come to drag the bridgeman to the gallows. Almighty, he prayed it would not come to that. He knew he _would _defy them, no problem with that. Only that it meant defying his cousin as well, and cracking the wedge which divided this kingdom even further, wider than Sadeas ever dreamed. He would lay dissension right on their enemy's silver trail.

And for a captain? No matter his skills, the gift he'd made of their lives, time and time again - the man was still a darkeyes.

It sounded ludicrous if he put it in so many words. Thankfully, however, the prince didn't _need _to; he felt it, in the arena, watching Kaladin lunge and jab at indelible targets under drizzles of cold sand, illuminated from within. Watching the man's clenched jaw, challenging death, nature itself. Or commanding it.

_There is greatness there_, Adolin thought, _the kind I could never reach. Even if I were royal ten times over. _

Save for his father and Renarin, he didn't know whose life he _wouldn't _trade for that man. With the grim thought turning spindly in his mind, Adolin slumped on the bed and slept.

He woke hours later; at least he hoped it had been hours. His ability to gauge the time already started to have cracks in it. The food he had gorged on the previous evening, ravenous after battle and with the pure thrill of being alive, of having done what's right, now seemed to him oily, spoiled. He stared at the remnants in the bowl as though they could crawl out and ooze towards him.

The darkness seemed thicker, the spheres mounted in sconces on the wall almost spent. When it moved, his own hand drew an arc, a slope through the night, as it reflected on the ceiling. If his fist curled, it resembled a tiny moon descending on the sky. He thought he should slit outside from bed, try some battle stances, but in the dense silence it seemed _inappropriate_. Like him and Elhokar when they were all kids, staying up to talk long after Renarin and Jasnah had drifted off, exhausted by their own brilliance. They would always try not to giggle too soundly, and would always, invariably fail.

He grinned at the memory, but could not sustain it. Storms, how had it all come to this?

There was little left from his previous satisfaction. The exoticism of being in a _cellar_, gold-rimmed pot and all, and the righteousness of being imprisoned in protest, faded away as well.

In the gathering dark, seeping illusions in the corner of his eye, Adolin started to doubt his decision.

_***_

By the fourth day (his twelfth meal, he guessed) he would rather be facing a Voidbringer.

His head ached, all the time, a continuous thrumming from the marrow of his neckbones to the forehead. The water was stale, and without it, too much food made him sick, as if he had to scrape it down his throat like a whetstone over a knife's edge. The prince tried to converse with some of the guards, when they could, but this side of the vaulted burrows was mostly empty. For some storming reason, they seemed to think he valued his _privacy_.

When had he ever had privacy? And what did men do with it, once they did?

By the seventh day, his body refused to sleep any longer. Apparently, it felt personally insulted by so much inactivity, after painstaking years of drilling fatigue and exercise and injury into him as if they were no more than regular duties. So apparently his organism's response was to shift all its energy - thwarted - onto his mind instead. Useless, sodden things; at times he wanted to be free from either one.

Whether because he was still too riled, or was trying to teach his son a lesson in restraint, Dalinar Kholin had not visited once. Renarin would have, he imagined, had the boy not thought it would likely make matters worse. It was a sensible argument. Adolin wished he could find enough strength not to resent them both.

Servants scurried in and out too quickly, too erratically and plainly terrified for him to ask anything much. Nervouspren and fearspren alike twirled around them in bobbing dots and streams. Spren, too, were almost nonexistent here; he did not know why. A week ago, he wouldn't even have noticed that.

The sashes of grey light that surrounded his own bedside confused him; they could not be exhaustionspren, since he'd seen their kind numberless times before. Gloomspren? He remembered Jasnah mentioning them once or twice, but he had never seen them around anyone. At that, Adolin laughed, sardonic. _Of course not_. _Do the people I surround myself with have any reason to be so? _Well, that was not the whole truth. After their mother died, his father had, and now Navani carried her own grief, but oddly enough, it seemed the ones who had the right to be the most despondent, the most open to fall, fought against it the fiercest.

He had to pull himself up - by his own green ears, Zahel would say.

The prince trudged his feet to the far corner of the room and began to practice.

He reenacted the entire battle in his movements, not as it were, but as it should have been. He swept in where Kaladin had, noticed the fallible spots in the opponent's armor faster than they themselves could expose them, _gliding_ underneath their initiatives in Windstance and parrying the tilted blows from his sides. He minced through the choppy attack, on the inextricable border between defense and pursuit. Anticipating, playing their own moves for them. Locking down in Stonestance, once only one opponent remained - it was not Relis, but Jakamav.

Adolin stopped with a pithless lurch. As if a thread had been snapped, his body ceased to fight even before it slowed. Jakamav. His _friend_. The prince remembered exuberant parties, flowing spheres dappling the artificial rivers, stumbling slaphappy through the palace. Holding onto every wall in those damned corridors, marbled stone cold against skin. Alcoves lit by pallid lights. A hand pressed against his mouth, sloppily enough, smelling like jessamine and spilled wine. Then a kiss against the hand; not from _his_ side, but from the other boy, who must have thought kissing Adolin through a barrier of his own flesh was some strategy. That this way, he would not defy Alethi propriety so much - so unforgivably much. Fingers deftly unlacing his trousers, parting with the gilded buttons as if they've never had a servant help in all their lives. As if he had thought this through, over and over, as many times as the younger prince had. Adolin's back slick against the wall, with the heat pooling there, the searching for more, until he was biting at the palm, seeking blood, seeking _anything_. Jakamav pressing both legs in between his with a groan, leaving not a single breadth of space, yet still finding him, wrapping him in his other hand. Adolin spilling over with a cry, almost before they understood what was happening.

He ran a hand through his hair. Beads of sweat gathered on his fingers, and he remained where he was, nailed down to the jail's floor. No, he could not think about it this way. Jakamav had been his friend. He tried to establish that, both to the boy he'd been and the man he was, to reinstate the truth in between two gulps of air. Stormfather, he couldn't _breathe. _Did the room suddenly get _shorter_? Adolin could feel the ceiling bearing down, like those nightmares of shrinking spaces and falling teeth.

_Get it together_. It wasn't as if he didn't know before today that the entire lot of them wasn't worth a chull's turd. Lighteyes, Highprinces. What rose them above all the other men? If they wanted to deride his father, his brother, for Storm's sake, he would deal with them the only way he knew. His frown melted into a distant smile, feral, unusual on his face. He remembered Elit's sickening crunch as he fell. He remembered Jakamav asleep on his chest, a century, a Desolation ago. No. There was nothing to mourn for, not there. What had Kaladin said? _Honor is dead_. Ash's eyes, but it made sense somehow.

But if he was not with them, and he was not with Kaladin's lot, where was he? Whose?

_***_

Dalinar did come, at blessed last, somewhere into the second week. Adolin had guessed right: he would be able to hear anyone headed for the bridgeman, because they had to pass by his cell first. His father stopped before the narrow airspace, looking, for a moment, entirely disconcerted. As though he was the last face he'd expected to see down there. Adolin grinned.

"I told you you had to increase my stipend", he said, smugness and relief warring for his tone. "Look at what it's come to: stealing wine from the barracks."

The Highprince shook his head in that way of his Adolin had grown to know, something between _snotty child _and unswayed, unadulterated affection.

"How are you holding up? I would've come sooner. I wanted to bring certain news." He paused, mulling over how likely that was. His face seemed somewhat haggard, sculpted sharper by recent events. "It won't be long until Elhokar comes to his storming-... royal right of pardon."

He was not interested in anything Dalinar could tell him, other than being out in the sun. He did not think to inquire once about how the preparations to move camp were unfolding, In actuality, Adolin had no clue if Elhokar even knew they were both there, bridge runner and prince, quietly rebelling against the orders of things. The rumor must've spread like pink-rashes throughout the warcamps. He hadn't thought about the King in several days. His mind kept swinging back to Kaladin, unruly circles to which he could bring no order, Kaladin and the past, Kaladin and what he'd seen him do. Bafflement, fascination, doubt, and then it was back to the past again. His mother, too; more and more often, these nights. Not memories with her, not properly, but wishful snippets, a patchwork of the life she would have had with them. Storms, but he needed to get out.

"Better sleep than I've had in ages, go figure", he retorted instead. "How is Renarin?"

Dalinar grunted noncommittally. "It'll pass. He expects you back, of course. We all do."

"Father, you know I cannot do that. Not yet." He didn't look to his left, towards the deeper part of the prison. He didn't need to. "Go to him. Try to... assure the damn bridgeman, okay? Tell him not to batter himself out yet: his thick skull would still lose against all this tone. Make Elhokar change his mind."

Once, he thought Kaladin's ordeal in Sadeas's army was something unfortunate, but certainly a suffering one could overcome. You only needed a little willpower, after all. Adolin felt a shame so powerful it stripped him bare, whenever he remembered this. It dangled in his chest, immeasurably heavy, and knotted itself like a hangman's noose. Not anymore. That darkness was still at his back, warm and almost fluid. He knew he'll find it again as soon as his father left.

Of course, he would never _ask _the man to stay. Just like he had not allowed his own valets to join him in prison, serve him and keep ward. This was his toll to pay; a small one, too small, but his to carry out. That sense of losing your bearings, of not telling apart shadow from impression, was only a fragment - almost a ludicrous mirroring - compared to what men like Kaladin had endured. 

After a second, Dalinar nodded at him. He could not make out the meaning in his father's eyes, the tones that tinted the cobalt there. And then he was gone, already drifting further into the cellars, ironrod back, sweeping steps. His uniform made a funny contrast among the lines of rusting metal, the Soulcast flagstones smudged with soot.

Adolin sighed, then forced himself to do some more exercises - at least until Dalinar left the premises for good. He did not want his father, the Highprince of Kholinar, to see him curled over the blanket, his face to the wall.

_***_

The last days, he slept. An unending chain of dreamlessness, punctured only by a few images, and by the rare snips of reality when he ate and washed himself.

At some point, he thought he saw a dressed silhouette flitting through the air - not human, no, but patently wearing _skirts. _They billowed under her like variances on the same ribbon she was cut out from. He thought his dizziness must be doing his head in, and tried to eat more food that evening. It was not altogether improbable it had been a vision, after all. He'd credited them to be meat for ardents and drunkards, but... oh, weakness had a whole different taste, now. He saw how it molded to you, close to the way the Plate did. A savored irony.

The silence in this prison amplified all feelings - even those who were not surface-bound, they would rip out from their quiet, remote places, and dangle them before you. He missed Jasnah more than he had above; no, he _mourned_ Jasnah, day by day since he'd been here. He even mourned his uncle, without the shock or vindication there this time, to sweep the loss aside. And remorse, too; remorse was the special treat. All your worst traits, misjudgements, petty cruelties, spread open on a dissecting table. So Adolin Kholin would sleep.

In one of those few, scattered dreams, an empire fell. He _heard _the crumbling stone, not like ballast being torn apart in a highstorm, not even the rumbling that preceded Navani's explosions on rock formations, but a sound as intimate as if the very earth disintegrated. A God's teeth biting down on it.

In another, Kaladin leaned on both elbows on Adolin's bed. As in reality, the bridgeman's hair hung over his forehead, obscuring his face together with all the emotions it could harbor. The eyes, however, glimmered. Two pinpricks of light in a sea of unknown things, things Adolin had no idea how to call out to.

Kaladin stretched out his arm, tawny against the blue linen. The raw delineation of muscle and sinew stood out before his eyes, enrapturing, like glyph-writ, like prayers. Adolin could not tear his eyes away. The bridgeman used his leverage to pull himself upward. _Good_, he thought, inarticulate even in dreams, _I would not have you kneel again_. Formless shapes began to dance behind his eyes. Kaladin straddled him, arms hemming him in from both sides. Adolin's own knees were useless, unwitting nerves he couldn't seem to coax into motion, and, Storms, he _needed _to. His mind could not give that need a shape, but it was there, roped around his limbs and his tongue, around every ending of his body. Then the bridgeman tipped forward and caught Adolin's mouth. No barrier this time; his breath was so hot it _burned_. Weakly, as if from a distance, he thought how it would feel being inside that mouth, swallowed down to the hilt--

Dawn caught him moaning against the sheets. _Talenel's Eyes. _It was like this, then, wasn't it?

It was like that.


End file.
